Perspectives

Dr. Margaret Palmer, the director of the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center in Maryland, will visit Ohio University on Monday, October 17 to deliver the keynote address to the first Innovative Environmental Monitoring Technology Symposium.

The address will be at 6 p.m. in Schoonover 450 and it is open to the public and free.

The Symposium is a gathering of researchers, regulators and practitioners from across the country and from different environmental monitoring fields to talk about and investigate the use of technology to solve monitoring problems.

Dr. Palmer will be talking about how we must solve existing problems at the “interface between people and the environment.”

To do that, Dr. Palmer contends that we must to improve the effectiveness of our environmental interventions globally. We need to change many of the ways we monitor environmental conditions, she says.

Changes are needed because both new monitoring techniques and new, more modern monitoring equipment is now available, according to Dr. Palmer.

The better environmental conditions are monitored, she believes, that all aspects of society will benefit. It is vitally important that we improve our abilities to monitor the environment, according to Dr. Palmer.

Simply, the better we monitor the environment – the quicker and better we can restore it.

In addition to her work with the Center, Dr. Palmer is a Professor at the University of Maryland in the Department of Entomology and in the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

She leads research groups focusing on watershed science and restoration ecology. She also is working on a project to restore the oyster and blue crab populations to the Chesapeake Bay.